Frank Harris III: NFL Protests Aimed At True Disrespect

A group of retired Chicago police officers kneel Friday, Sept. 29, 2017 outside headquarters on the South Side in protest of President Donald Trump’s comments about NFL players and in solidarity with Chicago officers who recently posted similar protests. (Chris Walker/Chicago Tribune)

A group of retired Chicago police officers kneel Friday, Sept. 29, 2017 outside headquarters on the South Side in protest of President Donald Trump’s comments about NFL players and in solidarity with Chicago officers who recently posted similar protests. (Chris Walker/Chicago Tribune)

My dad, as a soldier in the service of his country, recalls getting his bullets ready for what was surely an imminent attack.

It was 1951. Badly outnumbered. The enemy all around him.

Previous skirmishes had left several wounded, but thankfully no one had been killed — yet.

You are probably thinking my dad, now 87, served in the Korean War and was staring down soldiers from the armies of North Korea and China. But he was actually in Camp Polk in Louisiana and the enemy around him was fellow American soldiers.

But they were white.

"I saw some stuff there," he says, of the place where he did his Army training. "I just knew we were going to have a race riot."

He said the white soldiers did not fear or care about what would happen to them if they beat up blacks. There'd be no punishment. But the other way around would surely land blacks in trouble.

Their rifles in the barracks were unloaded, but my dad says he placed rounds in a Coke bottle beneath the barracks where he could get to them "when the stuff blew loose like [he] expected it to."

It never did get to the point where they pulled weapons.

But I think about black veterans like my dad when I hear, according to a recent Quinnipiac University Poll, that 60 percent of white Americans disapprove of NFL players protesting police brutality and racial injustice during the national anthem.

They dishonor the soldiers, critics of the players say.

But what is the true dishonor? Is it that a legitimate protest is done during the anthem? Or is the true dishonor that blacks, who have served and continue to serve, share the least of the fruits of democracy and have their service forgotten and defaced even while they are in their uniform?

I think of black veterans like Henry C. May Jr., who as a 19-year-old Marine became the first casualty of Lake County, Ill., during the Vietnam War when he was wounded in combat in 1965.

May, now 71, says he is an American Marine and proud to have served his country, but he believes it is "OK to protest during the anthem."

"If you want to be heard, a protest is a right everyone has," he says. "You should not be ostracized for it."

I have no doubt that the 60 percent of white Americans upset about the protests would be up in arms if it were they and their brethren living a life where racism can rear its head at any moment regardless of how much money, education or status one has.

That is, unless they are like former Chicago Bears coach and football Hall of Famer Mike Ditka, who lashed out against the NFL protesters by opining that there has been "no oppression in the last 100 years."

How does one fight such ignorance? Or is it willful erasure of memory of bad things done?

We disrespect the flag, it is said.

But what is the true disrespect? Blacks and others protesting police brutality and racial injustice in front of the flag? Or is it my dad recalling from his boyhood the story of how a black Army veteran of the Spanish-American War, whom he knew, was killed by a white police officer? How it went unpunished? How this has recurred in the generations after as it did in the generations before?

Or is the true disrespect how these 60 percenters show greater outrage over the red, white and blue cloth than they do over the unjust spilling of the red blood about which these blacks and others are protesting?

My dad says when he put on the uniform, he swore to defend the country against its enemies. But he deeply resented "the idea of being in the Army and being treated like a second-class citizen because I'm black."

He deeply resented being treated like the enemy in his own country.

And that is the greatest dishonor, the greatest disrespect.

Frank Harris III of Hamden is a professor of journalism at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven. His email address is frankharristhree@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter at fh3franktalk.